The Proofreader’s Revenge

Ottoline Frame has proofread for forty-one years and has read, by her own estimate, about eleven thousand books.

She is not an editor. This distinction matters to her more than anything else in her professional life and she has explained it, in her time, to four hundred people at parties who did not want it explained.

An editor decides what the book should be. A proofreader reads what is actually on the page against what is supposed to be on the page, and marks the difference, and has no opinions.

Ottoline has a great many opinions. She has never expressed one in a margin.

The catalogue of things she has let through

Not errors. She has never knowingly let an error through.

Things that were not errors.

A novel in 2003 in which a character walks four miles in eleven minutes. Not an error; the manuscript said what it said, and the distance and the time were both intentional, and the author had simply never done arithmetic. Ottoline queried it. The editor overruled it. It is in print.

A history in 2011 that attributes a quotation to the wrong person. Queried. Overruled, on the grounds that the misattribution was "traditional."

A cookbook in 2016 with a bread recipe that will not work. She queried the hydration. She was told the author had made it for thirty years. She marked it au, which is proofreader for author's usage, which is the mark you make when you have said your piece and lost.

Forty-one years of au.

The one she kept

In 1987, on her fourth or fifth book, a first novel by a young man whose name she is not going to write down here, there was a sentence on page two hundred and eleven.

It was a good sentence. It was, in fact, the best sentence in the book, which was otherwise a book of the kind that gets published and then does not get read.

And it had a typo in it. One letter. A word that should have been waiting was waking.

The sentence made sense both ways.

It made much better sense the wrong way.

Ottoline sat with it for about ninety minutes, which in 1987, at the rates then prevailing, cost her about four pounds of her own money.

Then she did not mark it.

On the seriousness of this

She wants it understood that this is, by the standards of her trade, an appalling thing to have done.

The whole discipline rests on the proofreader having no view. The moment you decide that the wrong word is better than the right one, you have stopped doing the job and started doing a different job that nobody asked you to do and that you are not insured for.

She has never done it again. Forty-one years, eleven thousand books, once.

What happened to the sentence

The novel sold about nine hundred copies.

In 1994 the author published a second book which did rather well, and in 1996 a third which did very well indeed, and by 2004 the first novel was back in print with a new introduction by someone eminent.

The introduction quotes the sentence.

It quotes it as an example of the author's early instinct for the unexpected word, and it spends a paragraph on it — on the choice of waking, on what it does to the image, on how it prefigures a preoccupation of the later work.

It is a good paragraph. Ottoline agrees with all of it.

The letter

In 2019 the author died, and in 2021 there was a collected edition, and Ottoline — who was seventy-three and had been retired for four years — was sent a copy by a former colleague as a joke, because she had proofread the first one.

She looked up page two hundred and eleven.

Waking.

Thirty-four years, four editions, an eminent introduction, and at least eleven proofreaders since her.

She wrote to the publisher.

She explained, in four paragraphs, what she had done in 1987, and offered her apology, and said that the correction should be made in any subsequent printing, and that she was aware this would require some explanation in the introduction.

The reply

It came six weeks later from an assistant editor of about twenty-six.

It thanked her for her interest. It said that the passage had been checked against the author's surviving manuscript and that no discrepancy had been found.

Ottoline read this four times.

The author had retyped his own manuscript in 1988 for the paperback. From the printed first edition.

She has not written back.

She has the letter in the drawer with the typescript of the 1987 book, which she kept, which she should not have kept, and which is the only one she has ever kept out of eleven thousand.